TV Really Might Cause Autism 619
Alien54 writes "Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders. The Cornell study represents a potential bombshell in the autism debate."
TV causes almost everything (Score:1, Interesting)
Politicans are trained by personality coaches to look great on TV.
So I guess TV is responsible for everything.
My opinion might be wrong. But at least it's my own opinion
Re:OMG! BAN TV! (Score:5, Interesting)
Would that be so bad really? I gave up on TV years ago and haven't really missed it. The decent stuff comes out on dvds anyway, the occasional funny/interesting clip can be found on youtube and for everything else there is bittorrent.
Imo TV is just a way to sell ads - and apparently that can be accomplished by showing low quality, stupid, "show-me-your-tits", "the-sky-is-falling" undiluted crap... or maybe I'm just getting old.
*posting anonymously as not to be identified as being old and angry:)
Re:A correlation shows no cause (Score:5, Interesting)
Bhutan (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reverse correlation? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Reverse correlation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's how I see it:
ADD started out being kinda rare, and only those kids with the obvious behavior problems were diagnosed with ADD; Ritilin seemed effective for them.
Ten or so years later, any kid who tapped their foot during breakfast got a mouthful of Ritilin on their way out the door. EVERYBODY had ADD (and the former behavior issue became known as ADHD).
Now, finally, ADD is more common than brown eyes (in the US anyway), but thankfully kiddy speed (Ritilin) is only generally prescribed for ADHD. That's good; it keeps the high schoolers from chopping it up and snorting it (seen it done by numerous people). ADD is now a disease of convenience; it's actually normal to have ten projects going at once, each of which is 1/3 done. It's also normal to finish one before you move on to the next. Neither behaviors are affected by Ritilin at all, trust me. But if you need an excuse for your bad grades, your kid's bad grades, your excessive passion and/or ambition for anything, by all means, get yourself some ADD.
Ten years ago, Autistic kids were incredibly rare. They were almost like Albino's - that rare. They were kids who were horribly sensitive to noise (you talking quietly sounds like a scream); they were generally mute; very emotionally sensitive; and in many cases, very gifted & talented (my mom's doctor's kid is REALLY Autistic... despite sensitivity to sound, he can play the piano like George Gershwin, no shit).
Today, if you seem shy on some days, you are Autistic. Now I can't really see excessive TV under (or over) the age of 3 resulting in shyness (I'm actually lying).
You see, TV doesn't cause Autism, medical professionals constitute Autism with the severity of the symptoms they choose to interpret as Autism. If you're 3, and you're ever so mildly reluctant to smile at the doc that day, and loud noise makes you cry (still makes me cry & I'm 24), you're probably running the word Autism through his brain, if not asking for a "referral to a specialist" (and hence a statistic as an Autistic case). I mean, I'm sure it's a little more involved, but that's the impression that I get at least.
I mean Cornell University, okay, I suppose. This kind of news IMMEDIATELY makes me suspicious of the drug companies. It's like they want everyone to expect their kid to become autistic in five years when their new Autism pez comes out. But, Cornell ain't a drug company, right, so I dunno...
Re:OMG! BAN TV! (Score:5, Interesting)
My set was broken and so I asked my wife to call the TV-guy. She said, you watch it more than I so why don't you call him?
After a couple of months, when still nobody had called, I ditched it and put a bookshelf in its place.
Never regretted it.
More sex, more talking, more reading, more workouts, more movie-going, more hiking, more biking, more everything.
TV is really time-stealer and when you at last are hooked to a TV-show, the idiots cancel it!
Re:OMG! BAN TV! (Score:3, Interesting)
Generally, yes. But it's entirely possible to have a TV and a cable subscription, and still be selective. Thanks to the VCR, I don't have to conform to the broadcast schedule, and I get to skip the ads. I hardly watch anything 'live' these days.
I suspect we're arguing about semantics, though. IMO, 'watching TV' encompasses anything you do with a TV set, this includes watching DVD movies, but also TV programmes that have been encoded into a digital file (torrent). There's no difference between watching CSI on cable or as a downloaded file.
DVD/torrent is just a more convenient method (than a VCR) of
a. choosing the programming you like, and
b. timeshifting.
An autistic speaking (Score:2, Interesting)
Many of us whach TV to try to understand the world, since as far as we can see, its a deeply f**ked up place, where people kill for fun, where people wage wars because they can and where people do jobs they don't want to do and then moan about it, yet refuse to do anything about it.
TV helps us understand the insane world around us, help us learn how people respond, what fatial movements mean, what body language as a whole means. We don't know thease things almost from birth like the majority of people. We have to learn them like somebody would learn quantum mecanics, except feelings don't have finite rules.
one fact for you, they tested all the enterants for Oxford Uni in the UK one year, and found that somewhere in the reagon of 75% had an "autistic spectrum disorder", and I would be interested to see about how many people on
anybody interested in more info, email me or message me on gmail (badspyro@)
thanks,
Badspyro
Re:Reverse correlation? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm allergic to (well, not really allergic, but hypersensitive) sugar and various related sweeteners like glucose etc. Before this was known I couldn't handle any criticism, loud noises etc etc. Used to cry a lot (the real heavy tantrums) and everything. I guess I could've been diagnosed with a million mental disorders, however luckily my parents found out it was an oversensitivity towards sugars and a type of foodcoloring.
Now I'm perfectly fine. No moodswings anymore etc. Still nuts as hell though, but who defined "normal" anyway.
There are more and more artificial stuff (artificial aroma's, food colorings, added sweeteners, preservatives etc. etc.) mixed with the things we eat, and it's shown that allergies or hypersensitivities towards these ingredients can cause all kinds of weird stuff with someone's personality, without causing real visible allergic reactions.
Diagnosing these types of allergies is also difficult because stopping to eat these types of foods doesn't usually have an immediate effect. It's not an on/off switch, but the effects are reduced gradually so it can be very difficult to quickly see wether or not someone is allergic (opposed to the acute reactions testable by those armscratch tests).
Most likely though it's a mix of factors.... a bit of television, a bit of allergies, and a bit of overactivity of the doctors
Re:OMG! BAN TV! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Let's see... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, I haven't found any easily accessible figures on how the age of the fathers has changed over the years but I'd hazard a guess that it would more or less follow the development of the age of the mother. And the age of a first time mother has gone up in most countries (one article quoted 21.4 years in 1970 that had risen to 25.1 years in 2002, US figures)
Re:What about the internet (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's just ban the word Austism (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want a controlled study, here it is: I have two children, by the same wife. One is perfectly normal. The other is autistic. I suspected there was something wrong with the Autistic one by the time he was nine months old. (Most babies love to be held. This one was completely hyper, and would squirm out of everyone's arms as soon as he was physically capable of it. He rarely slept. He walked early, but displayed odd mannerisms. While many toddlers are fascinated by television, he manifested no interest in watching it at that age at all.) But he was not diagnosed until he was three, because there was very little diagnostic criteria to go one. Babies really don't do much other than cry, eat, sleep and poop.
They both watched plenty of TV by the time they were three. Just like I did in the sixties. They are 10 and 11 now. I taught the eldest to read the usual way, and he is a voracious reader. He still loves TV. And video games. And fart jokes, and every other thing a normal eleven year old loves. He's still not autistic. The youngest, the Autistic one, would rarely sit still for a story. He liked to flip through books, but didn't want to be read to. He can read now, though. Know why? I turned the English subtitles on whenever he watched his favorite DVD's.
He learned to read watching television.
This study is bunk. It's not a theory. It's more like the plot to Halloween III.
Re:Say it with me... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are pirates out there sailing the seas. Quite a few of them.
It's not easy to find news articles about pirates, since the word has been stolen by the media to denote copyright infringers, however there are some [bbc.co.uk] news [bbc.co.uk] articles [bbc.co.uk] out there.
Additionally since piracy usually happens in international waters outside of the legal juristiction of any country there are rarely any prosecutions.
consequences (Score:3, Interesting)
Autism is on the rise http://www.fightingautism.org/idea/autism.php [fightingautism.org]. My mother is a school nurse and she's noticed a large increase in the size of the special ed classes. The number of students that are affected (and yes, you can tell that these kids really do have autism by observing them) has gone from a handfull to enough to fill more than two classrooms.
Think about what the possible mechanisms could be. It is not going to be anything exotic like radiation or refresh rates or the like. We are plopping children down in front of the TV during the time their brains are 'wiring'. Their brains are learning to deal with a world that fits in a tiny box and that they have no control over. The brain isn't something that plops out of the womb fully done; it learns to adapt to the sensations around it. A recent study [medicalnewstoday.com] suggests that an imbalance of communication pathways is a likely mechanism of autism. It is known in development that pathways are pruned as children develop ( Early Brain Development [sciencemaster.com] ).
So, plop a kid down in front of the TV for hours a day. They are transfixed and their brains are wiring to cope with a world in a box that they can provide no input to or alter in any way but changing channels, volume level or the off button. That's really not a stretch. Prepare for articles about tv watching monkeys.
Re:OMG! BAN TV! (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it is quite possible that there is a significant difference. Television refresh rates (30 Hz per interlaced frame in the USA, 25 Hz in some other countries) are much lower than typical monitors (60 Hz, non-interlaced, or higher) and furthermore, MPEG and other encodings result in an entirely different set of artifacts and display update rates and distributions than does broadcast television.
The assumption underlying your statement is that it is the content that is the problem; that may not be the case. Having a light flashing in your eyes at a rate you can see, but tend to ignore, may be part of (or even all of) the problem. My point is, "watching TV" includes a broad group of experiences, some obvious, some not. Television hardware does not present content the same way a computer monitor does.
Re:OMG! BAN TV! (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a thought experiment. We have three populations, P1, P2, and P3, which all have the same constituency of N, A, pA. As the children age, we can re-categorize pA children as either N or A. P1 will be our control group: they will interact with society and watch a little bit of television. P2 will be like P1, but be exposed to more TV. P3 will model lazy parenting: the children won't get much social interaction, and the only thing they have to pass the time is TV, so they'll get a lot of it.
If watching too much TV can promote autism, P2 will have many pA -> A. OTOH, if it's a lack of exposure to social interaction that causes underdevelopment of brain circuitry that regulates social interaction, P2 should resemble P1 and P3 will have many pA -> A.
Even if there is a very strong temporal link between two variables, correlation and causation are tricky. You can't always say, "The reason that my alarm clock goes off in the morning is because the sun rises in the sky," even if you can point to some region where the sun is obscured by the terrain and people don't use alarm clocks.
I would love for non-interactive, advertisement-soaked, eye-candy-filled, dumbed-down media to be less prevalent. When Internet access began to be ubiquitous, I got excited, but then I saw and heard all of the media companies wanting to turn the Internet into a new form of TV.
I know, my examples have bad analogies, poor metaphors, logical flaws, et caetera. But I hope someone gets my point. Lots of people think "pot makes you stupid" -- but maybe it's just that stupid people enjoy pot more than intelligent people do, which could explain statistics.
Basically, there are correlations, relationships, and patterns EVERYWHERE. However, it's very rare that someone knows exactly WHY something is happening. If we knew exactly how something happened, usually it would make it trivial to manipulate.
Re:OMG! BAN TV! (Score:3, Interesting)
Just judging based on what other people seem to say about their habbits on slashdot, I would gess that there are quite a few people who are similar to me in their TV watching habbits.
Re:A physician's view: this is a stunningly bad pa (Score:3, Interesting)
Freakonomics author's take on this (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A correlation shows no cause (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:OMG! BAN TV! (Score:2, Interesting)
Ever since, I've watched many friends and strangers alike ending up convulsed, bewildered, confused, unable, or perhaps unwilling to process the information, that is, the idea that I didn't have a TV, and that I otherwise behaved like a normal person (at least) in public.
Over the years, only a handful of individuals out of the entire lot actually retained that knowledge, the rest simply refused to, brushing it off as non-sense. A few litterally got scared, or at least that's what their body language let on; they couldn't fathom an existence without TV.
Anyhow, observing their reactions all this time has had me reflect on why it was so frightening for them. It occured to me that if only a small portion of the population don't have a TV per se, that it can work, but not if the majority did(n't). I think that the general population grew into it, into "being entertained" without much effort or real planning on their part, to a point where they've completely delegated this responseability to the networks.
It also seems there is this general boredom that has tainted the hard-core TV-viewing public in the last few years. This puzzled me greatly at the time because I couldn't relate no matter how hard I tried, and I don't think reality tv really helped them either. I think that perhaps it's a bit like fighting inertia, to pull one's self out of passive entertainment, to active living or leasure, most simply can't do it, or realize that this is the next step.
I wonder if it's made them passive elsewhere in their lives. Might that explain this last depressed-by-default generation?
Does TV cause autism? I doubt it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Spectacularly bad science (Score:5, Interesting)
children diagnosed with autism in 1999-2000 with the similar figure for 2003-2004, one sees that
over those four years the reported number has more than doubled.
Does anybody really think that the rates of autism really doubled in this time period. Isn't it far more likely that the rate of diagnosis simply went up. What would cause parents to become aware of this unusual condition called autism? Maybe they saw a segment about it on TV?
Isn't it simply possible that autism rates are correlated with TV watching because many americans get much of their information about the larger world by watching TV, and therefore the higher the rates of TV watching (determined in this study by looking at cable installation rates and precipitation rates - people watch more TV when it's rainy out ) mean higher rates of awareness of autism as a condition to ask your child's doctor about? So now, instead of being diagnosed as retarded, the child is diagnosed as autistic because the child's parents saw a segment about autism on cable TV on a rainy day.
Re:Let's see... (Score:4, Interesting)
> cable makes doctors more proficient.
Of course, cable TV does not cause doctors to become more proficient. But it is not unlikely that
the two are correlated, the link being personal wealth. As personal wealth increases, a family is
more likely to have cable TV, and it is more likely to have access to better doctors. It is quite
possible that this cause explains the data. More research on the matter would be good, of course.
There is not enough data to clearly see cause and effect here.
Chris Mattern
The problem is with the visual (over)stimulation (Score:5, Interesting)
Go watch a classic episode of I Love Lucy or The Honeymooner's or The Twilight Zone. It's not uncommon for one camera shot to last four minutes. And at that point in time (I'm thinking 1960s and earlier) it was common to listen to dramas on the radio -- Green Lantern, Lone Ranger, The Strangler, etc. -- so the listener was actively involved in building mental imagery. Kids who have been raised on a steady diet of modern tv don't have the patience for old-fashioned TV or stories (or, for that matter, conversations requiring well-developed listening skills)... it's too "boring." (IMO, their brains aren't well adapted to concentrate for that period of time and they find it tiring and/or difficult.)
Re:Spectacularly bad science (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, I think if your 8-year old child couldn't speak, or make eye contact, and generally preferred banging his/her hands to interacting with you in any fashion, you'd probably know something was wrong (even without Donahue telling you, or whatever the hell people watched in the early 80s), and get them to a doctor.
The first few years of life are pretty critical for neural development; a lot of 'thermostats' in the brain are set during this time, and it really isn't that hard to imagine that activities performed for several hours a day might have some influence on these processes.
Re: Spectacularly Annoying (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Something is WRONG with your child when they are autistic. You know there is because she/he doesn't act normally. A minimally responsible parent figures out what it is.
2. The medical condition of autism is well-defined. It doesn't just visit the child like a common cold. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/autism.cfm [nih.gov] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism [wikipedia.org]
3. "retarded" is not a medical condition. That is the social term for a host of developmental problems.
people watch more TV when it's rainy out
This is the West. It doesn't rain much... There's no excuse for watching more TV other than babysitting your child for you. I'll go further than that and say there is no reason for children to watch television until at least 5. But this means parents have to raise their children. So it's an unpopular opinion.
Please consider your opinions in this matter as poorly constructed as the science you claim is flawed.
Re:Spectacularly bad science (Score:1, Interesting)
Television watching isn't an explanation, at least not in my son's case. I had a television and a DVD player, no cable. Occasionally, after he was about 3, he was allowed to watch one 30 minute choice television show such as veggie tales. I'm very strict about how much television time in comparison to quality learning time that my child has.
I've never used a television as a 'babysitter'.
A lot of things have increased along with the diagnosis of autism. Including, awareness. Many cases of autism are obvious, you can tell that your child has a problem early on. When your raising a child and that child starts to talk and then suddenly regresses, as a concerned parent you need to know what is going on. And no, my son is very bright, he communicates, talks occasionally and knows some sign language. He isn't retarded, and doesn't bang his head against a wall.
reducing the health risks of smoking (Score:3, Interesting)
It's worth noting that lung cancer rates only exploded post-WWII. People had been smoking for thousands of years, but lung cancer was a relative unknown.
The change was that some years before manure, which had been used for fertilizer on the tobacco plants, was requisitioned for the war effort (gunpowder, explosives or whatever). Tobacco companies had to switch to Rock Phosphate to fertilize their plants. They liked it because their tobacco plants grew quicker & bigger, with less labor invested in gathering animal dung.
You don't hear much about the downfall: rock phosphate has low levels of natural radioactivity. Tobacco plants concentrate radioactive ions in their leaves... A dose or two of rock phosphate isn't much for concern, but when applied to the same fields year after year, the radiation levels in the plants have become significant.
With that said, I Don't smoke, never have, and Don't encourage it. If I did smoke, I would buy organic tobacco (American Spirit, for example) and roll my own, or perhaps "stuff my own", into a pre-rolled paper w/ a filter, like my college roommate did. It's cheaper, much much healthier to boot, and you know exactly what you're inhaling (that's a reference to cigarette companies putting all sorts of weird chemicals in their products).
Search for 'radioactive tobacco' for more information.
huh (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Spectacularly bad science (Score:2, Interesting)